


and where are the lilacs? and the poppy-petalled metaphysics?

by thewalrus_said



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Asexual Character, Introspection, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-25
Updated: 2019-02-25
Packaged: 2019-11-05 06:19:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17913428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewalrus_said/pseuds/thewalrus_said
Summary: The evening was uneventful. All of their evenings had been uneventful, since Sir Caroline had abandoned them on the shores of Ballast. // Arum had always assumed love to be an emotion, a simple feeling like anger, or curiosity, or excitement. At the most, perhaps it was like the thrill of a successful experiment, which lit through his veins like sunlight. // Rilla was never one for meditation, as much as she recommended it to Damien. She was too busy, and too conscious of how busy she was, to let her mind go quiet for longer than a minute or so.A triptych.





	and where are the lilacs? and the poppy-petalled metaphysics?

**Author's Note:**

> Hi everybody! This is my piece for the Penumbra Mini-Bang, and I'm really excited to be posting it at last! I was lucky enough to get TWO amazing pieces of art, which you can see at the beginning and end of the fic. They were done by [rotenkehl](http://rotenkehl.tumblr.com/) and [spectral-sketch](https://spectral-sketch.tumblr.com/) respectively. Special thanks go out to the #second-citadel crew, for many hours of happy headcanoning. I hope you enjoy the fic!

The evening was uneventful. All of their evenings had been uneventful, since Sir Caroline had abandoned them on the shores of Ballast. Sometimes they came across the corpses of those beasts, monstrous or otherwise, that must have had the misfortune of encountering her on her travels. “You see, Sir Damien,” Angelo would boom every time, bending over a bloody mass. “We are on the right track! Sir Caroline must have come this way, and so this way must be the right way to come!”

Every time, Damien would feel a sick swooping in his stomach, followed by a distorted sense of relief when the mangled body was determined not to be that of a four-armed lizard. _Relief that I have not been robbed of his death,_ he would tell himself. _I would be disappointed if she killed him only because then I could not kill him myself. That is all._

This evening was even quieter than most; no birds swept through the night sky, no grazers shuffled through the grass outside of the light thrown by their small fire. Angelo’s deep breaths were all that cut the silence.

Angelo took the first watch, but when Damien lay back for sleep before his own turn, the sleep would not come. Finally, after an hour of lying quietly, Damien sighed and sat up.

“Sir Damien! Why are you not resting?” Angelo asked, startled. “You are meant to be asleep!”

Damien shook his head and stared into the fire. “I dreamed, last night,” he said, after a few minutes. “It has made me afraid to sleep again.”

“Tell me of it,” Angelo said, sliding closer to him. “I must not have a sleep-deprived rival.” He slung an arm around Damien’s shoulders and gestured for him to begin.

Damien reached up and took hold of his pendant, unconsciously rubbing the icon the way he had so many times. “I dreamed of the second day of the great battle, when Saint Damien the Tranquil stood against the second army.”

Angelo huffed. “If that frightens you, I wonder that you ever sleep at all. You must dream of him often.”

“I do, but this was different. In this dream, he was not... He was… He was _terrified,_ Sir Angelo,” Damien said, shaking his head. “His every limb shook with fright, and he vomited not once but twice while watching the monsters swim toward him. There was no strategy, no confidence. No tranquility. All he felt was fear.”

There were tears in Damien’s eyes, he found; he had been watching his namesake in the dream, but nonetheless had felt every churn of his stomach, every tremor in the saint’s hands as he wielded his spear. Next to him, Angelo hummed thoughtfully and frowned. “I find it strange, Sir Damien, that this vision troubles you so,” he said, after a few moments of silence, “when that is how I have always pictured the scene.”

“What?” Damien gaped at him. “Saint Damien is the saint of _tranquility,_ Sir Angelo! He bravely stood -”

“Against the second army of monsters, only moving at the exact moment needed to sweep them away in a whirlpool,” Angelo finished. “But, Sir Damien, they don’t just hand out sainthoods for things that are _easy._ ” Damien leaned back, shocked, and Angelo went on, “Why, if they gave out sainthoods for doing things that come _easily,_ I’d be the saint of being incredibly strong, and incredibly witty, and the finest knight in all the land!”

He nudged Damien at that, who remembered his cue this time. “Second finest, my dear Sir Angelo.”

Angelo laughed. “Quite, quite. But you see, I am _not_ the saint of any of those things. Nor, I suspect, will I ever be a saint of any kind. You see, most things come easily to me.” That got a chuckle out of Damien, which made Angelo grin. “No, Sir Damien, I have always believed that your namesake’s tranquility was as hard-won as your own. If not more so, as he had no model to draw on as you do.”

“I suppose that’s possible,” Damien said faintly.

“Something to think about, at any rate.” Angelo took his arm from about Damien’s shoulders and rubbed his hands together. “Now, Sir Damien, sleep! It is still my turn for the watch, and I shall not have you cheapen it by helping me. I bet my watch is eight times less eventful than yours turns out to be.”

“Sleep. Yes.” Damien touched his pendant one more time before lying down. “Good night, Sir Angelo.”

“Good night, Sir Damien.”

Sleep finally came, and Damien dreamed again, once more seeing his saintly namesake tremble and weep as he stood holding his spear, watching the coming onslaught approach. The dream extended slightly this time, however, allowing Damien to see the saint’s final moments of waiting. Saint Damien sucked down air in great heaving gasps, but as the underwater beasts grew ever closer, something curious happened. The gulps of air seemed to take effect. The saint’s limbs grew steady, his back straightened, and his face became as tranquil as it ever was in Damien’s imaginings, until the monstrous horde was nearly upon him. As the saint hefted his spear, Damien woke calmer than he had been in weeks.

He took his watch from Angelo and sat staring into the darkness around them, mind whirling. Could it be true, what Angelo had said? It made a certain kind of sense. One could hardly expect a sainthood to be easily won, or it would mean nothing. But Damien had always assumed that the title of The Tranquil had been given due to the saint’s character. Could it be that it was gifted due to a single act, a solitary moment of hard-won serenity?

It seemed impossible. The second saint had always been Damien’s hero, a model to strive toward. Where Damien was weak, the saint was strong; where Damien faltered, the saint held true. To imagine Saint Damien as just a man, brave but terrified...it bordered on the heretical. How could an ordinary man draw upon such depths of tranquility, if they were not in his heart always?

Unbidden, the memory of the first monster Damien had ever slain came to the forefront of his mind. He had been nearly sick with fear as the large, spiny mass had rolled closer to where he and Angelo stood, until the moment he had forced himself to nock an arrow, whispering a prayer to his saintly namesake. As he raised the bow, he had felt the prayer answered, peace overtaking his heart as he sighted and released, felling the beast with a single shot.

But that was a nonsensical comparison. He had prayed to Saint Damien, and Saint Damien had answered. The peace had not come from within, but above. The saint’s tranquility, on the other hand, _had_ come from within, for as Angelo said, there was no one before him to ask for help.

But had it? Could Angelo be right? Did the saint struggle, as Damien himself struggled? He had always thought his name was in honor of that which he most needed, but was he so named for a similarity, instead? It was inconceivable. And yet, it might be possible.

What would it mean for Damien, if it were true? It would mean he prayed to a flawed being, a mere man like himself. It would mean that that which he sought, a peaceful heart untroubled by constant worry, was likely unattainable. Without such a heart as a model for himself, Damien’s hopes in that arena would have to be extinguished. Damien would have to remain the doubt-riddled, overbearing, intolerable mess he had always been.

But - if his namesake, Saint Damien, had been the same, could he really be so bad? Damien knew he was hard to be around. In his whole life, only two people had freely chosen his company, only Angelo and Rilla. But they had chosen it time and time again. Rilla had agreed to marry him, and she was the smartest person Damien knew. He might, on his worst days, be able to write off Angelo’s friendship as a dare the other knight had taken upon himself, to befriend the most trying man in the Second Citadel, but Rilla was far too practical for that. She would never torture herself in the company of someone truly unbearable to be around.

Perhaps, just perhaps, a deeper similarity with the saint would not have to, by definition, drag the saint down to Damien’s level. Perhaps it meant that Damien was never as low as he thought, to begin with.

But then, if that were true, why had the saints cursed him with an unnatural and traitorous heart? Why would he be stricken with love for a monster, if he himself were not, at his core, monstrous? That, Damien could not puzzle out, not in a month of uneventful watches. The more he pondered the matter, the more convinced Damien became that he could not unlock that riddle’s answer until he saw the lizard again. Their meeting would result in his death or his salvation; there could be no other outcome.

The sun crested over the treetops, sending beams of brilliant light into his blinking eyes. “Come, Sir Angelo,” Damien said, reaching out to shake his best friend and rival awake. “We have a lizard to find.”

\-----

Arum had always assumed love to be an emotion, a simple feeling like anger, or curiosity, or excitement. At the most, perhaps it was like the thrill of a successful experiment, which lit through his veins like sunlight.

He had been wrong. Love was not an emotion.

It was a second skin, a cape that wrapped around his head and down to his toes, unable to be removed, mostly transparent except when the light caught it at a certain angle. Anger could be soothed, curiosity satisfied, excitement dulled. Love was there wherever he looked, whatever he did. He could not shake himself free of it.

The Keep had no notes for romantic love. Arum had not learned of the concept until late adolescence, when the Keep sang him a song in the human’s language that contained the word. When he asked what it meant, the Keep gave him a dry, factual definition, which made sense; the Keep never mated, and the only beings it came in contact with were its children. It did not feel romantic love, and so could not explain it. The Keep’s guardians who had come before Arum had lived solitary lives, only interacting with others when fighting to defend themselves or the Keep. Love had not factored into it, as far as Arum had ever been able to glean. Not that he had ever pushed very hard on that particular subject. He learned the word, assumed himself as immune to the emotion as the Keep itself, and moved on.

Now he found himself trapped in it, twice over.

At least Amaryllis made sense. She had seen him at his worst, his most exhausted and unforgiving, and she had still seen fit to sing with him. If it was not inevitable that he should love her by the end of it, at least it was logical. He could track the progression of the feeling, identify the beats of its half-life, recognize the places where it curled into his thinking. It was _rational._

Damien, though, was a different matter entirely. The yearning Arum felt in the knight’s direction was completely without foundation, and it was infuriating. A scant few hours spent in each other’s company, solely spent trying to kill each other, and Arum found himself ensnared. It was intolerable. It could not be allowed. But claw as he might at the fabric of it, it would not tear.

To be _wanted,_ physically, was a wholly new experience, and one which Arum, had he ever given the matter a thought, would have assumed would be entirely disgusting. He was a stranger to sex, and happily so; even now, caught up as he was, the thought of being _had_ was repulsive. To be _wanted,_ though - as with so many things, Honeysuckle was proving the exception. Arum found he did not mind being wanted, as long as the one doing the wanting was Damien.

Impossible. Over and over again he presented Amaryllis to his own heart as an exemplar, the shining pinnacle of true connection with another being, and over and over again his heart clung to the earlier attachment alongside her, until finally he gave up in despair, and let his defenses collapse.

Love was choking him, and fear, too. For now Amaryllis was gone, and with her the Hermit, and the monsters who held his contract would be beating the door down once more. He had kept them at bay while Amaryllis was with him, the Keep denying them entry and Arum able to present scraps of progress when they forced their way through. But now the Hermit was gone, and with it Arum’s taste for violence against the humans, and the Keep was still exhausted. The monsters would come, and they would take him, and it would be Fort Terminus for him, without a shred of doubt.

The Keep had not realized yet; it had barely been a day since Amaryllis departed, and the Keep was still asleep more often than awake. Guilt twisted in Arum’s stomach with every snore, and in the absence of distraction he allowed himself to revel in it. His beloved Keep had been crying out for rest, for mercy, and he had rolled over its every complaint, missed every sign that it put forth, all in the name of killing humans and satisfying his own personal curiosity. The Keep did not hold grudges; it could not afford to, with only one companion at a time. Arum would have to hold this grudge against himself on its behalf. For as long as he could, anyway, which was unlikely to be long.

Was it worth making himself insufferable, during the scant few moments the Keep was awake? It might make the impending separation easier; the Keep would grieve his loss no matter what, but surely whatever he could do to preemptively ease that grief would be kindest. But Arum found he did not have the stomach for it. He was nearly universally disliked among his own people, and most of the time he relished the status, but now that his time with the Keep was ending he found he could not bring himself to sully it. It was utterly selfish of him, but Damien wanted to kill him and Amaryllis had been furious when they parted; Arum wanted one being to think well of him once he was gone.

_Dead._ He forced himself to think the word. There was no point beating around the bush about it. In the sanctity of his own head he had always demanded pure objectivity; he had no use for euphemisms. His fellow monsters would come, and they would try him for his failure, and they would toss him off the edge of the world, and he would be dead, dead, dead.

The Keep stirred, a low musical grumble coming from the walls. A few vines twitched up to wrap around him where he sat. He gave the wall a stroke, cursing himself for his weakness. _You should be resting,_ he sang, a quiet dancing melody that trailed off at the end like falling asleep. _You’re still exhausted._

The Keep sang a soft negative and continued to rouse itself. A quiet interrogative followed. _She’s gone,_ Arum replied. _She left yesterday, just after you fell asleep._ The vines around him tightened, one reaching up to strum along his face in sympathy.

He sat in silence, waiting, until the moment of discovery came. The Keep sang out a panicked clashing of vocals, a wrenching disharmony, and Arum steeled himself. “Yes,” he said. He could not break the Keep’s heart in his mother tongue; he did not have the strength. “The Hermit is gone. Amaryllis took it with her.” Another discordant series, this time in anger. “There’s no point in cursing her, I let her take it. After what it did to you, after what _I_ did to you with it, I was glad to see it go.”

A trembling minor fall, and the vines around him coiled even tighter. The Keep knew what that meant as well as Arum did. He sighed. “Yes, most likely. But you mustn’t fight them when they do.” A major third, tossed off like a snort. “I mean it.” He forced himself out of the Keep’s embrace and started to pace through the greenhouse. “You’re still weak, and even at your strongest you couldn’t fight off those two pig oafs at the same time, let alone anyone else they might bring. All it would do is injure you further.” He raised a hand as the Keep started objecting. “Would you _listen_ to me?” It abated, grumbling. He switched back to song. _You created me to protect you, and I hold that duty above my own life. They will take me no matter what either of us do; we are not warriors, you and I, and I will not see you injured in my defense. We always knew this day would come._

_Too soon,_ the Keep trilled. Arum put a hand on the greenhouse’s wall and said nothing. _Too soon, too soon,_ the Keep repeated, until finally it too fell silent. When the vines came up to wrap around him again, he let them.

Eventually his stomach started to growl too loudly for the Keep to ignore. It was almost funny that in this, the twilight of his life, Arum’s body could still find the time to fail him. _Hungry,_ when there was so much to do, and so little time to do it in. It was preposterous.

The Keep released him to eat, and he took advantage of the respite to begin preparations. With his death, there would be a new egg. The Keep would produce the egg wherever it chose to come out, there could be no control over that, but the closer it was to somewhere suitable for incubation, the better, and so he gave into instinct and began nesting. One in the greenhouse, one in his workshop, and one in his bedroom near the top of the Keep, each with enough pillows and blankets to cushion whatever size egg the Keep produced.

He meant to build one in the kitchen as well, but as he dragged the last of the blankets into the room, the Keep sang out an alarm. “Here already?” Arum said, feigning easiness he did not feel. He dropped the blankets near a wall, piling them up as best he could before twisting vines grabbed hold of him.

The Keep manifested a doorway and pulled him into his workshop, vines wrapping so tightly around him he could not move. “Stop this immediately, you ridiculous being,” Arum snapped. Irritability was always close to his surface, and he took refuge in it now. “Release me and let them in.” A strangled negative. _Release me!_ he sang. _I’ll face this on my own two feet, thank you._ He kept pushing against the tendrils around him until finally the Keep gave him one final squeeze and let him go, a single unceasing note of despair issuing from its walls. _Thank you,_ he replied over the Keep’s cry, doing his best to block out its despair. He brushed himself off, squared his shoulders, and went to meet his death.

\-----

Rilla was never one for meditation, as much as she recommended it to Damien. She was too busy, and too conscious of how busy she was, to let her mind go quiet for longer than a minute or so. But sometimes a minute or so was all she needed, to keep herself from screaming or throwing a punch.

Sir Caroline was _testing her._

With Damien, Rilla recommended that he work towards clearing his mind. His thoughts were the cause of most of his troubles, and he needed to learn to erase them, or at least quiet them. Rilla, on the other hand, found herself at her most relaxed when she was _working,_ elbow deep in some puzzle or problem that only she could solve, if only because she was the only one with the inclination to try. So, as Sir Caroline grumbled about _some_ people who couldn’t _keep up_ when they got themselves _lost in the woods_ as she made camp _,_ Rilla tucked herself out of the way in the roots of a large tree.

She had a handful of hypotheses, and she had the raw materials necessary to test them. Rilla shut her eyes and got to work on the first one.

Hypothesis: She was in love with Lord Arum.

Methodology: She cast back in her mind for a pure, untainted memory of Damien, one where her love for him was not blinding, but a constant thrum in the back of her mind. She settled on one just a few days before she told him she loved him for the first time; he had brought her dinner toward the end of one of her experiments, when there was nothing to do but wait, and distracted her out of an entire evening of impatience. Holding the memory in her mind, she brought out the memory of walking with Arum and discussing the origin of her favorite folk song, and hung that up next to it.

Result: She was _definitely_ in love with Lord Arum.

Rilla pushed back the swell of panic. This was an official experiment; it would be unscientific to process her results until after the whole thing was done. On to the next step.

Hypothesis: Her love for Damien was smaller than it had been.

Methodology: She pulled out another memory. This time, it was dancing with Damien during the festival, the day before Arum took her. Rilla let herself fall into it, remembering what it felt like to look at him under the lights and know that saying yes to his proposal had been the right choice, the _only_ choice; to kiss him and see the rest of their lives spooling out next to each other.

This time, she had to make a new data point. Putting her hands over her ears to further block out Caroline’s grumbling, Rilla let herself slip back into that same mental space. She pictured marrying Damien, growing old with him, listening to his stories and rambles, dancing with him. She held up the warmth in her chest next to the memory.

Result: Her love for Damien was greater than it had been.

Reassuring, yes, but also _fascinating._ She filed the result away and moved on.

Hypothesis: Holding two loves at once meant there was something broken inside her.

Methodology: Rilla took stock of herself. She didn’t _feel_ broken. She felt more whole than she had ever been, in fact. But that wasn’t scientific; she had to be scientific about this.

If she were broken now, and she hadn’t been broken before, there must have been a breaking point. Presumably, the breaking point would be the moment she fell in love with Arum. When had that happened? It was difficult to pin down an exact moment, but sometime during their last day together, she supposed. But there was no moment in that time where she could realistically put a break, or really at any point since she’d met Arum. She’d been stressed, for sure, and missing Damien with everything she had, and desperate to escape, but she’d never lost control of herself beyond accidentally falling asleep.

Result: There was nothing wrong with her.

The Citadel’s motto could shove it. Not exactly scientific, but true enough that Rilla filed it away anyway.

A final hypothesis: She had to choose between Damien and Arum.

Methodology: Rilla had no idea how to go about testing this one. Right from the start, she knew she didn’t _want_ to choose. She wanted Damien, and she wanted Arum. She wanted to get both of them in a room together and see how they interacted, Arum’s gruff practicality hiding a sense of wonder and an almost immature desire to be liked, up against Damien’s pure emotionality that often obscured his whip-smart mind and sharp instincts about people.

The stumbling block was going to be Damien. Try as she might, Rilla couldn’t think of a way to start explaining everything to him that wouldn’t end with his heart broken before she could finish a sentence, and the thought of hurting him made her want to throw up. If she could just keep him quiet and in one place while she talked, Rilla knew she could get through to him, but he would stop listening as soon as she said she was in love with someone else.

Or maybe he wouldn’t. For all his imagined fragility, Rilla knew Damien was stronger than he gave himself credit for. Maybe, if she got it out quickly enough, his heart would heal itself before it finished breaking, and everything would be okay.

Result: If push came to shove, she would choose Damien, but she had to try and see if she could get through this without making the choice.

Rilla pulled out her recording device as Caroline built up the fire. The knight was still talking to herself, loud enough that Rilla could record her results in a low voice and not be heard. She listened to them play back over and over. The findings were clear: she loved them both, and she wanted to keep them both. Time for an action plan.

Step one: She had to lose Caroline. Rilla lived near enough to the jungle to know that the best thing to do if you get lost is to stop moving. Caroline, however, seemed determined to keep them pressing on so fast that Damien would never find her. She knew Damien couldn’t be far behind them; she just had to figure out how to stay still without delivering Caroline what she wanted.

Step two: Explain everything to Damien. She elided over the details of this for the moment. It was going to be tricky, and they would probably both come out of it with some emotional bruising, but above all Damien wanted her to be happy, and he would listen to her if she said both he and Arum made her happy.

Step three: Find Arum. She missed Arum _now,_ but he would have to wait. She couldn’t go back to him with Caroline in tow, the knight would kill him without missing a beat. And besides, she wasn’t sure she could see him and not kiss him, and that would be disloyal without talking to Damien first. No matter what happened, she couldn’t be that cruel to Damien.

Step four: Explain everything to Arum. Rilla had no idea what the standard relationship model for monsters was like, but she had an instinctual feeling that Arum would be easier to convince than Damien. And who knew, maybe he and Damien would actually like each other, once Damien stopped trying to kill Arum for kidnapping her.

Step five: Kiss the lizard. The rest of it, figuring out how to juggle two partners, the logistics of travel between her hut and the Keep, seeing if Arum and Damien might actually get along enough that they could all spend time together, that could all wait. But Rilla had wanted to kiss Arum in that long hallway in which they’d parted, and she was unaccustomed to having to wait to kiss someone. She’d kissed Damien about thirty seconds after deciding she’d wanted to, only pausing to ask if he had wanted it too, and since then he’d never been far away whenever she’d wanted to kiss him. Now she wanted to kiss him and then kiss Arum, and both of them were far enough away that she couldn’t count on being able to kiss either anytime soon, and she _hated it._

Speaking of things she hated...

Caroline interrupted her thoughts to hand her some cooked meat on a stick. “Eat up and you’ll heal faster,” the knight said, shaking the stick when Rilla didn’t immediately take it. “The sooner you heal, the sooner we can move faster and I can kill that manipulative lizard.”

“That’s...that is _so_ not how that works,” Rilla said, but took the food anyway. She was hungry, and she didn’t want to test how long it would take before Caroline took it away and wouldn’t give her anything. Although she did have some hypotheses on that front, the prevailing one being “not long at all.” The meat was at least good, surprisingly well-seasoned for a makeshift campfire dinner, and she ate more quickly than she’d expected to.

The sun was low in the sky and dropping lower with surprising speed. Rilla’s ankle ached, but with food in her belly she found herself drifting off despite the pain. She blinked herself awake twice before giving up; after all, she’d tested her hypotheses and she had her next steps. She was more than a little worried that falling asleep near Caroline would mean waking up in chains, but on the other hand, staying awake meant interacting with her _more,_ and honestly the chains might be worth it. Besides, sleep was the only way she would keep her ankle immobile, it seemed, so the next time she found herself nodding off, she let it happen. If she woke up restrained, she woke up restrained; at least then Caroline might let her stop moving. And that, after all, was step one.


End file.
